Firefox Is Going 64-Bit: What You Need To Know

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler determined that figuring out the 64-bit confusion surrounding Firefox it will be 'near the top' of his to-do list this summer and fall. One could conclude that Mozilla has no idea at this point what people are expecting from a 64-bit version of Firefox, so Dotzler is asking for some feedback. More speed? More security? What about plug-in availability? All of the above, please."

Comments

Re:App idea that is directly related to this!

[MightyMartian]

This loony quack is getting quite annoying. For the record, chiropractors are fraudsters, voodoo witch doctors in suits who take in the gullible. This particular bird has that extra pathetic aspect in that he seems to actually believe the bullcrap he spins to others.

You're a fraud pal, a vile repugnant fraud.

Re:App idea that is directly related to this!

[MightyMartian]

It ain't bordering on slander, it's reporting the reality that you're a fraudsters, along with all the other vile fraudsters in your "profession".

Re:Why ?

[TheRaven64]

I've not seen my browser use more than about 800MB of memory (and that seems quite ludicrous), but there are several reasons to want a 64-bit version:

• In 64-bit mode, you have more registers available. This makes makes compiling JavaScript easier.
• You can store a 63-bit integer or a 32-bit floating point value in a JavaScript pointer and only promote them to real objects wrapping 64-bit values when an operation would lose precision. This reduces memory required for JavaScript.
• 64-bit, on x86, implies the existence of SSE. This means you can generate efficient SSE code instead of slow x87 code.
• Most of your other apps are increasingly going to be 64-bit, so launching a 32-bit app will result in swapping in a huge number of 32-bit versions of shared libraries.
• 64 is bigger than 32, and customers want more of those bit thingies.

Re:Eh?

[kripkenstein]

I thought I had been running a 64bit Firefox for years. So I wasn't? Or is this about finally doing a 64-bit Windows build? Probably since Moz Corp is entirely focused on Windows and treats Linux as a red headed stepchild.

I am a Firefox dev and a Linux user. Mozilla is definitely not focused on Windows, in fact many of us devs use Linux (I am posting from Ubuntu right now), and many of the rest use OS X. Windows is in the minority.

There are 64-bit builds available from our build system, but we don't promote them. The reason is that we don't spend as much effort on QAing 64-bit builds, we have limited resources and are focused on the standard (32-bit) builds for the most part.

There are some good reasons for 64-bit browsers, for sure, but AFAIK none of the major browsers make that a priority. For example, there is a 64-bit IE9, however it ships with a hobbled JavaScript engine (without JITs), so clearly they don't intend it very seriously.

In any case, given that Firefox is open source, anyone can build a 64-bit version. I believe several Linux distros ship a 64-bit Firefox, for example. There used to be some problems with running 32-bit Flash in it, but I have heard that is workable now too.

Re:What do I expect? Nothing

[onefriedrice]

I have nothing against making it a 64 bit binary in general, but there really is absolutely no advantage to doing so. If your browser is eating more than 3 gigs of memory, your browser is broken, you should fix that problem first, not make it so it can eat more memory.

You're probably overlooking one of the major reasons why 64-bit binaries are beneficial (at least on the x86-64 architecture): more registers! More registers means less accessing main memory or cache just for local variables, which means faster code.

A 64-bit Firefox is also preferable if the rest of the system is already 64-bit because the need to load a whole bunch of 32-bit shared libraries which are only used by one program will be eliminated, meaning less wasted memory which may lead to better cache utilization. I'm not sure how congruous this last point is because I'm not familiar with how Firefox is built on the relevant platforms.

Re:If Mozilla has no idea what to expect

[Anaerin]

At the moment, 64-bit FireFox will only run 64-bit plugins (As I know, running Windows FireFox Nightly 7.0a1 x64 as my default desktop browser, And there are 64-bit plugins on Windows for Java and Flash). They're working on it, though.

And most of the memory leaks are being caused by poorly-written or resource intensive plugins (Like FireBug), and they're working on that, too. "about:memory" in nightly builds now lists a complete tree of what's using the allocated memory, and more reporters are being introduced all the time.